I believe this is the first paper to describe reference counting: George E. Collins. A method for overlapping and erasure of lists. Commun. ACM 3, 12 (Dec. 196

I believe this is the first paper to describe reference counting: George E. Collins. A method for overlapping and erasure of lists. Commun. ACM 3, 12 (Dec. 1960), 655–657. https://doi.org/10.1145/367487.367501 https://doi.org/10.1145/367487.367501